


Made to Hold

by klioud



Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Artistic Liberties or More Accurately Headcanons Ahoy!™, Canon-Typical Violence, F/M, Felannie Secret Santa 2019, Gender-Neutral My Unit | Byleth, Introspection, Kissing, Love, Mentioned Glenn Fraldarius, Mentions of Death, Minor Injuries, Spoilers for Annette-Felix Supports, Spoilers for Azure Moon Route, Spoilers for Byleth-Felix Supports
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-24
Updated: 2019-12-24
Packaged: 2021-03-09 20:33:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,037
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21932254
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/klioud/pseuds/klioud
Summary: Blue Lions | Azure Moon. Pre- and Post-Time Skip. Canon Compliant.Felix knows that his hands are weapons.The nerves and the veins in his hands are like the strings of a violin: they can only do what they are meant to when the right implement stirs them. Any weapon is a bow hair in Felix's hands. Adrenaline is music. There has only been one other sound— a voice— he has found as enthralling as this.
Relationships: Annette Fantine Dominic/Felix Hugo Fraldarius, Felix Hugo Fraldarius & Glenn Fraldarius, Felix Hugo Fraldarius & My Unit | Byleth
Comments: 9
Kudos: 60
Collections: Felannie Secret Santa Gifts of 2019





	Made to Hold

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Beepy](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=Beepy).

> For Beepy, who requested a story about cute cuddling and kissing! I promise there are some of those at the end of this thing— this fic just got out of hand real fast. 😅

Felix knows that his hands are weapons.

This did not always appear to be their sole purpose: as children, Ingrid would sit cross-legged and dig her fingernails into her knees while Felix plucked burrs from her tangled hair. When Sylvain glanced too frequently at nearby doorways, Felix would gather the material of Sylvain's sleeve into his fist to keep Sylvain from sneaking off without him. Dimitri would startle and sometimes laugh as Felix pulled the prince by his capelet towards the training grounds. 

It was only once reality was laid as bare as his brother's bones that Felix came to the realisation his hands were not meant for these things.

Hands have a place where they are at home. His could not be found in Ingrid's hair or along Sylvain's arm, let alone anywhere near Dimitri's person. Where his hands belonged was wound as tightly as the leather on the grip of a blade. 

His penmanship would not reveal this: his old man had insisted that his sons practise their handwriting at least half as often as they did swordplay. Peers and instructors alike would compliment his writing on its gracefulness and legibility. But despite their praise, Felix felt no ownership for his calligraphy. He may as well have dictated his words to a scribe for all that he felt he had penned them himself. 

The nerves and the veins in his hands are like the strings of a violin: they can only do what they are meant to when the right implement stirs them. Any weapon is a bow hair in Felix's hands. Adrenaline is music. There has only been one other sound— a voice— he has found as enthralling as this. 

He is at home anywhere he has a reason to clench his hand into a fist.

The thought might have once been comforting.

It is not until the war that Felix notices that the joints of his hands have begun to ache. Something about his grip has changed; something about _him_ has changed. There is a sensation deeper than the soreness in his muscles that make him feel slightly sluggish. His fingers close even tighter on his sword. It feels like it might just slip out of his hand otherwise.

Poor judgement on the battlefield earns him a small gash on his non-dominant arm and a brief glimpse of clarity: it is not his weapon that he fears losing. Someone calls out to him as Felix pivots and brings his blade up into his opponent's unarmoured armpit. Muscle-memory takes over from there. Felix cannot quite recall how and when his opponent ended up on the forest floor. All he can see are eyes like sea glass. All he can hear is a question he had shelved long ago.

In the past, Felix had been keen to answer the late professor's question. Now he is afraid to just look at it. His adrenaline goes off-key. His nerves threaten to snap. 

“Coward,” he hisses. 

“Pardon?” someone asks. To Felix's well-concealed surprise, a man in the robes of a healer stands next to him. Whatever pain his shoulder had been in has disappeared along with the wound.

“Nothing,” Felix says. 

He refuses to be spineless, even if finding the answer to the professor's question might leave him boneless in the end. So he does not hesitate to make for it a place in his mind. The question lives like a fire does: spitting sparks and testing the edges of the fire ring. Its heat threatens to ignite the thoughts he has long kept buried in his mind: the rumours of a monster inhabiting the monastery. The dread that comes with every letter regardless of its seal. The hundred thousand terrible possibilities that the next second might bring and everything awful that has already come to pass.

Felix clings to hope like he does to his weaponry. Convinces himself that he will arrive at an answer so long as he keeps pushing.

Time passes. His adrenaline is still out of tune.

One day, a letter from Ingrid arrives reminding him of the promise their class had made nearly five years prior. She informs him that their classmates intend to make good on their word. Felix scoffs. He can barely remember even being seventeen, let alone making a promise as silly as that.

Nonetheless, Felix goes to Garreg Mach. 

It is as good a reason as any to investigate the rumours of the monastery's monster. Although he would not admit it to anyone, Felix has another reason to go: he wants to see familiar faces. Perhaps seeing them again after all this time might help him find his grip. 

Little by little, memories from his days in the academy resurface. They grow clearer as he draws nearer to the monastery. He stamps out whatever emotional sparks come skittering from them.

Only, one escapes his notice.

It grows warm in his throat before he even knows it is there. Felix hums as he sharpens his blade. When he finally realises what he is humming, a part of him wants to laugh. 

He has not felt like laughing in a long time.

* * *

Returning to Garreg Mach turns out to be one of his better decisions. 

The professor and Dimitri are both alive, more or less. Almost all of his classmates are as well: Dedue is the sole exception. Gritting his teeth, Felix pushes the thought as far from his mind as he can. Of his remaining classmates, he has only seen Sylvain and Ingrid with frequency throughout the past five years. The last he had seen of Mercedes had been three prior, and Ashe four.

He has not seen Annette in five.

Felix recognises her right away: somehow, Annette has changed in every way and in none at all. Her hair no longer ends in ringlets but in waves. Her cheekbones appear more prominent than he remembers them being. She may have even grown a bit taller— but then, he has too.

There is one difference he can detect between the Annette in his memories and who is she now: a fire unlike those that fill his mind with smoke lives in her. One always has, but now it burns on the outside. Fervid.

With an eyebrow raised, Ingrid leans into his field of vision.

“Felix? You feeling okay?”

“I'm fine,” he says. “Why'd you ask?”

“You're...” Ingrid shakes her head. “Never mind. Let's go, there's work to be done.”

* * *

He decides that he was not wrong to think of Annette as a fire.

Felix overhears her singing in the library and finds her lyrics on his lips for the remainder of the day. Later, he catches himself humming her newest melody as he double-checks his equipment. They are to depart the following morning for their first mission in five years as a class.

For a fleeting moment, he almost feels seventeen again.

As nonsensical as it sounds, Felix cannot help but wonder if it might be a good thing. Some part of him hopes that her music might jog his memory. That her music might push the tuning pegs of the violin he is into place. 

After the mission, whenever he happens to hear Annette sing, Felix spends a few minutes lingering within earshot of her. Sound seems to travel farther in Garreg Mach now than it did five years ago. That, or Annette simply sings more often than she used to.

It does not help that he hears her now even when she is not singing.

He has unwittingly invited another fire into his mind. There is no fire ring to keep it contained, but there is no smoke either. It is a fire that does not burn: it _glows._

She is more sunlight than flame.

It takes him a good second or two to recall that he has a sword in his hand. Despite his loose grip, it does not feel as though anything will slide out of it.

Felix decides then and there to ask her to sing her other songs for him.

* * *

One of Annette's song possesses a rhythm that pairs well with the pace of his footwork. It fills the spaces of his mind that Felix has abandoned in favour of an intense focus on Byleth's movements. 

Felix feigns a step to the right and Byleth takes the bait. Slashing diagonally, the professor nearly nicks him. For the first time in over a year, the adrenaline in his veins sounds right. It harmonises with Annette's fervid song. Felix half-twirls out of the way. Lunges forward. The tip of his blade finds itself at the professor's exposed throat.

He has won.

Neither of them move. It is as if time has suspended itself. His eyes find the professor's own. To his surprise, they are not grey things.

They are not Glenn's eyes.

Felix lets the sword slide from his hand and clatter against the cobblestone floor of the training grounds.

He could never win— and now, he knows what it is that he feared to lose. But it is something he had lost long ago when he was just thirteen.

“I've spent all these years training for a duel with a corpse,” he admits to the professor. To himself. 

He would never know if he was stronger than Glenn. Just as he would never know if he could have prevented Glenn's death if he had been stronger.

But he could test himself against the professor. He could prevent more from dying as Glenn had. That had to count for something.

With time, Felix finds that it does.

* * *

The war is over.

Even so, there is no shortage of work left to be done. Felix finds himself with a sword in his hand at least half as much as he does a pen. Between reviewing and signing government documents, he writes down Annette's lyrics and his own musings. The handwriting, he finally feels, is _his._

Hands have a place where they are at home. His have residency in more than one place.

Felix never imagined that he would find home in something as small as Annette's hands. The first time he ever held them, he noticed a thread-thin scar as pale as a bow hair running the width of her left palm. It had looked to him like a line to be crossed. If he put his palm against hers, there would be no turning back.

He did not hesitate to make for her a place in his heart.

Their guest chambers in the capital are colder than expected. Annette's hands should not be quite as cold as she claims them to be. They have been huddled under the heavy blankets of their bed for the last twenty minutes. Felix has half a mind to stick his foot out over the edge of the mattress to cool off.

“I can't believe how cold they are,” Annette says unconvincingly. Even so, Felix folds his hands over hers and breathes against them.

Annette giggles.

“Your hands are cold too!” she complains. He chuckles when she slips her hands free from his to cover them with her own. 

“And yours are too small.”

“Yeah, well, I've got a neat technique,” Annette says. He laughs a little as she quickly rubs her hands back and forth over his own. Any faster and his hands might just catch fire. 

“Still cold,” he says. Pulls his hands away. 

She pretends to frown at him. Felix lets her for one second. Two seconds. Five. Then he pushes off of his elbow to scoot closer to her and snakes his other hand over her shoulder. Annette inches closer to him until she is just about near enough for him to— 

—kiss.

Pushing off of her own elbow, Annette closes the last few inches between them all at once. Felix lets out a two-note laugh against her lips before she fills all the available space in his mind with her glow. His hands move of their own accord along her shoulder blade and the edge of her jaw.

If his hands were made for one purpose, it is this: to protect and cherish those most dear to him. 

Felix would not have it any other way.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for your time!


End file.
